iPhoto lost my files, help please!

Dear Forum,

About 1 month ago my dad came to me with this odd problem: many of his photos on his iPhoto library were shown in the thumbnails but when you clicked on them, the actual photo would not show up. A big, gray exclamation mark would be displayed instead.

I googled the problem and I found a couple of posts of people with similar problems. Apparently iPhoto can sometimes lose its structure and you may need to "repair" or "rebuild" the library. No big deal - I said. I followed the advice in the posts and made a copy of the whole iPhoto Library folder "just in case". (step 1)

I restarted iPhoto (while holding alt+cmd) and tried every single repair option without success.
I started to worry a bit more.

- "show in finder" option will not work for the lost photos.
- I tried using spotlight with a name of a lost file but it will only get me thumbnails or previews, not the original file.
- I finally used the terminal and browsed around a bit:

For what I get there's a MASTERS directory at the root of the iPhoto library that contains subdirectories named after the year of import, so for example I have folders MASTERS/2012 and MASTERS/2013

Judging by the photos that I'm missing, there should have been a MASTERS/2011 directory that is now gone. This should represent about 4Gb worth of data.

Solving my problem now:

1. Do you guys see anything that I could have missed? Do I have any hope to find my original photos somewhere else in the hard disk?
2. Otherwise, could someone recommend a good data recovery software (ideally free or not very expensive)?

Unfortunately even specialized software might be unable to recover my photos as I made a huge copy of the iPhoto library at
step 1.

Preventing disaster from happening again:
Backups of course. But in order to avoid repeating such an unpleasant experience I need to understand what exactly happened and why. Is the drive damaged? Do I have a virus infection?
Is there a way to accidentally erase a whole MASTERS directory from iPhoto?
Is iPhoto simply SO unreliable?

thanks a lot for reading, hopefully someone can help me out here.

__________________________________
PS. I'm using iPhoto 9.1.5 on a 2011 imac with Lion

Macmonter said:

I, too, am interested in the cause of this problem and it's solution.

Click to expand...

Macmonter, go check your MASTERS folder inside your iPhoto library.

after some discussions in the apple support forums https://discussions.apple.com/message/22489778?ac_cid=op123456#22489778

I've come to the conclusion that this is most probably me a software bug.
If you can't find your original files in the MASTERS directory you better start looking for a data recovery software.

I will try a couple my self and tell you.

Also, I will start using something other than iPhoto, i can't trust this software anymore.

musukosan said:

I know this doesn't help NOW, but this is the reason I use a referenced library. I don't have to worry about iPhoto (or in my case Aperture) taking control of my photos and screwing something up. I can store them wherever I want and I can easily back them up.

Click to expand...

super late reply but I think it's worth discussing.
Hello musukosan, do you think a referenced library is more thrustworthy than the 'default' (non-referenced) ???